Thursday, March 28, 2013

Say it Again?

I'm over at Revising & Editing today talking about Redundancies. I hope you'll pop over to join the discussion!

This is something I have a problem with in First Draft Writing. I had great difficulty recognizing this as a problem when I first started writing a few years ago. I felt more like I was reinforcing the idea rather than irritating the reader. Thankfully I'm finding it easier to spot in my drafts these days.

What I find interesting is how quickly I find something like this when I'm doing my read-through. I might come across a passage in Chapter 1 that I'll think, "Hey, didn't I write almost the exact same thing somewhere else?" and sure enough, I'll find it in chapter 3 or 4.

I rather suspect that I'm getting worse not better at everything - possibly because I'm trying to do too much but if you don't push you won't get there! I shall pop over to read your guest post now I've done having a moan!

Redundancy is huge. Sometimes it's just forgetting and sometimes it's not trusting the reader to get it, I've decided. I find that printing out the story helps to find repetiveness. Thanks for the reminder.

Good luck with all that redundancy clean up! I often highlight things I suspect are redundant, using different colors so I can id them easily and compare them later. Three red fonted areas means I may have written the same thing three times! Yikes.